Wave Connect is Wave's official add-on for Google Sheets. Use it to quickly upload customers, products, invoices, bank transactions and bulk journal entries to your Wave business. You can also download customer, product and invoice data, and easily create multi-period balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow reports.

What is Wave Connect?

Wave Connect is a Google Sheets add-on that allows you to quickly and conveniently upload and download data with Wave.

You'll find Wave Connect particularly useful if you're in the process of moving to Wave from another accounting system, or any time you want to get a lot of information into Wave without typing in each entry manually.

If you invoice customers by referring to data that you already have in a spreadsheet, Wave Connect can save you time by further automating your invoicing process.

Install Wave Connect in Google Sheets

To start using Wave Connect, click the button below to install it from the Google Add-ons Store:

To install Wave Connect from your account, navigate to the Integrations page in the left-hand navigation menu. Locate the Google Sheets integration and select Add to Sheets.

Connect to your Wave Account

Now that you've installed Wave Connect, you will see it as a new menu option in your Add-ons menu in Google Sheets.

Hover over the Wave Connect menu option to see a sub-menu to Connect Wave Account.

You'll get a prompt in your spreadsheet to connect your Wave account. Click the Connect Account button to make a connection.

Wave will open in a separate browser tab and ask you to agree to share information Wave Connect needs to work. Read this information and confirm your agreement to continue.

If you're not signed in to Wave while you're connecting your account, Wave will aslo ask you to sign in.

Use Wave Connect to download data

Wave Connect enables you to download customer, product and invoice data from Wave directly into a Google Sheet. (You can also access this information, as well as transaction data downloads, by going to Settings > Data Export in Wave.)

To perform any of these downloads, click the Add-ons menu in Google Sheets, select Wave Connect > Download, and choose data you want to download.

In the sidebar that opens, select the fields you want to include, and refine any options you'd like. Once you've made your selections, click the Download button to download your data.

Download Tips:

All the downloads work in a very similar way. Here's what they have in common:

If you have multiple businesses in your Wave account, select the business you want to download from. Note that Wave Connect is unable to access data from the "Personal" business in your Wave account.

Select the fields you need by clicking the checkboxes to the left

Drag the fields to re-order the order in which data is downloaded

Product and invoice downloads have some special features:

Product and invoice downloads have a Filter section. Use the filters to select specific sets of product/invoice data.

The invoice download also has a Data to Download section. You can choose between basic invoice data, or indicate you want to include line items or payment details.

One final tip:

If you open a download sidebar in a spreadsheet page where you have previously downloaded Wave data, Wave Connect will pre-select the download fields, and re-order them. This can be really helpful if you like to download data repeatedly in a consistent format.

Use Wave Connect to upload data

Wave Connect allows you to quickly upload lists of customers, products, invoices, and bank transactions. You can also upload a bulk journal transaction, which is particularly useful when posting starting balances. Note that for journal transactions, each upload will be a single post, even though it may add values to many Accounts.

To use any of the uploads, click the Add-ons menu in Google Sheets, select Wave Connect, then Upload, then the data you want to upload.

A sidebar will open to lead you through the steps of preparing and uploading your data. All the uploads are structured around 3 steps:

Prepare the Upload Sheet

Wave Connect will set up your input spreadsheet for you, by writing in the necessary column headings. It will also set data validation rules to make sure the data you input is valid. This could be something as simple as making sure you don't put text where a number is needed, but it also includes giving you drop-down lists of permitted values. For example, when you prepare an input sheet to upload Invoices, Wave Connect will insert a column for customer name and set all the cells in that column with a drop-down of your existing customers.

Note that some of the Upload sidebars give you choices about how you want to input your data. For example, do you want to input countries as their names ("Canada"), or their 2-character codes ("CA")?

Enter and Validate the Input Data

Using the prepared input sheet, you're going to enter your input data. You might type this in, or more helpfully you might copy it from another spreadsheet where you already have the data.

Tip: The order of the columns on your input sheet does not impact the upload. If it's easier to rearrange the columns so you can paste data in more easily, doing so won't impact your data.

Once you have your data input, click the Validate button. Wave Connect will check the accuracy of your data. If there is anything it doesn't like, you'll get a very specific message telling you what to fix. Correct the data and click Validate again—keep doing this until all your data passes.

It's time to upload!

Once your data has validated successfully, you can go ahead to the Upload step.

Depending upon which data you are uploading, this might be just a click on the button, or you may need to provide a little more information to go along with your upload.

And you're done! Wave Connect will report the number of records uploaded, and add hyperlinks so you can jump straight to the uploaded records in Wave to check them out.

That's about it, but we do have a few additional tips for you:

Extra tips for uploading data:

When Wave Connect builds an upload sheet for you, it has to get data from Wave to make the drop-down values, and then it remembers these data. If you add new data in Wave and want it to be available to link uploaded data (like a new Sales Account that you'd like to link to a Product you are uploading), click the Refresh Lookups link at the bottom of the main section of the sidebar.

When you upload Invoices, add one row per Line Item (i.e. each invoice product). Wave Connect will start at the top of your spreadsheet and assume rows belong to the same invoice until it sees a change in customer. It will then build an invoice for the next customer until there is another change, and so on. Note that when you Validate your data, Wave Connect will apply shading to the rows, that makes it really easy to see where each invoice will start and end. If you want to force a new invoice for the same customer insert a blank row.

Wave Connect will Validate or Upload from the sheet that you are on when you press the relevant button. You don't have to use the formatted spreadsheet with the lookup values; once you clearly understand how your data works, you can insert the correct column headings into any spreadsheet and upload directly from there. If the data Validates, it will Upload. This is a great trick if you regularly export data from another system and want to import it to Wave.

Use Wave Connect to Generate Reports

Wave has a full suite of financial reports, and generally also provides you the ability to compare a report for any period against the same report for any one other period. For a few reports, however, it can be useful to be able to compare against many periods, and Wave Connect makes it easy to do this with the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Report.

To use any of the available Reports, click the Add-ons menu in Google Sheets, select Wave Connect, then Reports, then the report you want to output.

A sidebar will open where you can select all the details of the report you want to produce.